On June 1, 2009 Mike Bracey posted a critical response to the Open Letter, In Defence of Youth Work, within which he questions whether youth work is more at risk now than at any other time in the past 30 years. Indeed he implies that the In Defence argument is past its sell-buy date and that the debate needs to move on – see http://www.cypnow.co.uk/Archive/909779/defiance-youth-work-revolt/

To be honest it is refreshing to see our critics putting finger to keyboard. By and large they favour the time-honoured and often effective tactic of maintaining an aloof silence, refusing to give alternative views the oxygen of publicity. So  I hope my belated reply to Mike is respectful of his willingness to put his head above the parapet, whilst being in deep disagreement with his shot across our bows.

My response to be found below is posted on the CYPN site at http://community.cypnow.co.uk/forums/t/1303.aspx

If you so desire you can add your pennyworth either here or there!

Michael

Your entry into the debate is welcome, even if it is to chide us for not moving on. And you do damn us with faint praise, claiming both to enjoy and agree with much of the Letter, whilst arguing in defiance of our evident ‘revolt’. I’ll curb my desire to reply at length to the host of issues raised and content myself with taking up some key points in your argument.

• As for evidence that something is rotting in the state of Youth Work, I can but recommend you read Bernard Davies’s New Labour Years, Tony Jeffs and Mark Smith’s Valuing Youth Work in Youth and Policy, 100 or most recently the De Montfort University Inquiry, Squaring the Circle http://www.dmu.ac.uk/Images/Squaring%20the%20Circle_tcm6-50166.pdf

• We are in agreement that the tradition of youth work is haunted by a tension about its character and purpose. It is the source of that classic essay title, ‘Is Youth Work an agency of social control or social change?’ However this not a steady state, as you put it. The space to pursue the democratic and emancipatory youth work defined in the Letter opens and closes according to balance of social and political forces at any given time. The second paragraph of the Letter with its reference to resisting the advances of the Manpower Services Commission in the early 80’s outlines briefly this sense of struggle. Over the last decade we have failed largely to fend off New Labour’s managerial obsessions.

• You despair at the claim that the government wishes to confine to the scrapbook the idea that youth work is volatile and voluntary, creative and collective. Yet in choosing to leave out the concluding part of the sentence – an association and conversation without guarantees – you reveal the chasm between us. My sense of the volatile, voluntary, creative and collective is related umbilically to a youth work process, which is neither imposed nor scripted. Your references are all to pieces of practice driven by the governmental imperative, schemes and competitions of one kind or another. This is not to say that there aren’t workers and young people involved in making the best out of them. It is to stress that these top-down initiatives carry in their soul the values of the market , setting worker against worker, young people against young people. In this scenario the worker is more social entrepreneur than social educator. You misunderstand completely my use of the notion ‘volatile’. I am not describing the hurly-burly of a Friday and Saturday night, which evidently requires the combined forces of the police and youth workers to manage young people’s behaviour. I am using ‘volatile’ to capture the unpredictability and uncertainty of the youth work relationship, which is in many ways the fount of its inspiration.

• When you talk of workers being on the edge or the need for reflective practice, I can have no quarrel. Your dilemma is that if management do want to protect workers taking risks, if management do want workers questioning what’s going on, they have a responsibility to provide the necessary support, time and space. And indeed they must be prepared to be self-critical about their own practice. Their task is to encourage democracy in the workplace.

• You accuse me of taking an easy way out by blaming the government. I see myself as criticising necessarily the track record of the present elected New Labour administration. This is a government under which poverty has deepened and inequality has widened. Given that Wilkinson and Picket evidence that almost all social problems stem from the root cause of inequality, it’s a bit rich to suggest that New Labour has anything but an ambivalent relationship with the young unemployed or what it has dubbed ‘feral youth’. For a decade this government has pursued economic and social policies antagonistic to the interests of the majority of its citizens, young and old. Comi-tragically it is now revealed as hypocritical and amoral, pursuing ‘benefit cheats’, whilst lining its own pockets at every opportunity. Given its refusal to deal with the money-laundering mafioso in the City, it hardly occupies the high ground when lecturing young people about anti-social behaviour and criminal activity.

However, without the recent, remarkable and largely unexpected implosion of the economic and political order, the argument for debate set out in the Letter would have fallen by the wayside. For example, the challenging reaffirmation of social-democratic youth work, A Manifesto for Our Times, written by Bernard Davies was largely ignored on its first appearance. More fortunately the Letter has chimed with a growing mood of unrest, a rising desire to argue things through afresh. With this in mind I ‘m not sure how to interpret your closing lines. If I am failing to see the houses for the bricks and there is a more fruitful debate about Youth Work going on, let me know and I’ll come along. As for whether you’ve lost your independence by way of drugs or the company you’ve been keeping, I’ll give that a miss. All I will say is that your defiance smacks of denial, an unwillingness to admit that a classic or democratic Youth Work has had a very rough ride thus far in the 21^st century.

Tony Taylor